


Lazarus (alt. 'The Old Men & The Sea')

by smolhombre



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Background Relationships, Can be Read as a Standalone if you CBF, Canon-Typical Violence, Captain America Sam Wilson, Domestic, Explicit Sexual Content, Extended Metaphors, F/F, F/M, Friendship, Genuine Care and Affection, Getting Back Together, Getting Together, Grief/Mourning, Healing, Let me fix the mess marvel made, M/M, Making Mistakes and Fixing Mistakes, Non-Linear Narrative, Polyamory Negotiations, Slow Burn, Technically a sequel, Thems my kinks i dont make the rules, Unreliable Narrator, existential pondering, i mean kinda
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-30
Updated: 2020-06-29
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:22:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24989746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smolhombre/pseuds/smolhombre
Summary: After coming back from the dead, Sam gets used to living. New-living, and again-living, and learning where the old and new overlap. Sometimes it feels like the threads in his life are fraying apart the more he tries to pull them together, but he’s managing. Really.
Relationships: Bruce Banner/Brunnhilde | Valkyrie, Darcy Lewis/Wanda Maximoff, James "Bucky" Barnes/Sam Wilson, Sam Wilson/James "Bucky" Barnes/Thor, Thor/Sam Wilson, past Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes
Comments: 1
Kudos: 14





	Lazarus (alt. 'The Old Men & The Sea')

Sam has not touched Mjolnir in seven months, three weeks, and four days — give or take five years. That’s fine. That’s great. If anything, that has been the first thing in a very long time to make Sam’s life easier, and not harder. After lifting it that first time, he’d not wanted to bear the weight of it again. For once, he’d gotten his wish.

Thor has been gone for five years, six months, two weeks, and two days of that time. In the face of that gaping absence, Sam’s had a harder time forgetting the years he missed.

He keeps count of this in his head between living his life — and he’s  _ been _ living it, no matter what Barnes nags him about — because saying it out loud would be more painful than dying. And Sam knows what it’s like, now, to die. 

On his right, Barnes clears his throat, and Sam shakes himself back to the present. Of the lot of them, Sam thinks Barnes probably had the easiest time in coming back from the dead. Then again, he had the unfair advantage of practice.

“Ready?”

Sam grunts in response, shifting his weight and clicking the little screen on his wristpad to life. Four red heat signatures come to view on the display, huddled close to one of the building’s exits in the basement’s service corridor. Barnes doesn’t wait for anything else before slapping the emergency exit button, and the clickswitch change in air pressure wrenches them both from the quinjet.

On rising, Sam had thought that the world would have had a big enough taste of chaos and death and destruction to hold them over for at least a few years, much less four and a half months. But as Sam lands with a neat, tucked in roll on the sidewalk, he has to spread his left wing quickly to cover both himself and Barnes from a spray of bullets. Things changing and staying the same, and all that.

* * *

Pepper is waiting in the lobby of formerly-and-once-again-renamed Stark Tower’s secondmost top floor when Sam returns. Her blouse is pressed sharp and tucked into her newly loose skirt, and her undereye bags are almost the same dishwater grey that her eyes are. 

“I’m going to donate the building,” she greets him, a tight smile on her face bringing the lines bracketing her mouth to life. She speaks a bit like her jaw is wired too tight. “I signed the papers today. I wanted to let you know myself.”

“Papers…?”

Sam unfastens the harness for his wings and rolls his shoulders out after shucking them off. Behind him, he feels Barnes’ heavy gaze on his back like a physical weight — replacing one for another, the one worn into the callouses and contours of his back, easy to forget until it was removed, the other unyielding and present more often than it’s not. In the space between sleep and waking, Sam sometimes half-remembers it mooring him in a five-year void. 

Pepper’s bangles jingle delicately on her near-emaciated wrist as she shifts her weight, perhaps under Sam’s far-off stare. Her words don’t make sense until they very suddenly do.

“Oh.” Sam’s body feels abruptly like all the stuffing has been taken out. His ears ring, a little. It doesn’t feel or sound like it’s Sam speaking at all. “Oh. You want us out. Oh.”

Peppers brow furrows up, her eyes on Sam’s boots. He wiped most of the filth and blood off in the jet, but he’s sure he’s tracked some in on the shiny floors regardless. Barnes grabs the folded wings from the slack grip of Sam’s hand, slinging them over his shoulder. The jostling noise they make knocking into his rifle jolts Sam back to his body, to the present.

“When do we need to be gone?”

“Sam, I — with everyone  _ back _ all at once there’s so little room. I can’t keep telling the city ‘no’ when they ask to use this space. It’s not right. All the shelters for ten blocks over are packed beyond what they can take, and the fire marshal is getting ready to start kicking people out.”

“You don’t need to explain yourself to me,” Sam says evenly. He even means it. It’s the right thing. He had offered as much when the remaining stragglers had started to coalesce in the barren remains of the tower, but on Pepper’s initial refusal had maybe, apparently, become more settled than he intended. “It’s the best thing,” he grins, not even meaning it a little. “When do we need to clear out?”

“Can we do the end of the month? I think that’s all I’m able to push them back for. We’re adding another kitchen for the food bank, and they’ll need to start reconstruction to make the second sublevel temperature-controlled for a storage space, too...” She doesn’t look apologetic when she says it so much as she looks weary, drawn and wan and slumped over, even stood in a pair of red-bottomed heels. How she managed to keep up with little things like that while the world went to shit is beyond Sam. 

_ Eight days _ ? Sam bites his tongue and doesn’t say it. He looks around the room, mentally cataloging the equipment in the floor below, the residential apartments that will need to be swept clean, the vehicles, the computers —

“Sam? Is that...I know it’s a lot. But. Is it okay?”

He clears his throat.  _ ‘Okay _ ?’ Does that exist, anymore? “Sure. It’s fine.” 

He’s done harder.

* * *

Scott nearly launches a drone into Manhattan in an attempt to shrink it so that it’s easier to move. Sam would have viewed this as a potential stressor, perhaps, on another day. But after a morning that stretched and stretched and would not end, Sam’s back aching and sore in ways that reminded him he was now on the side of forty he does not remember becoming, he is content to watch the vein in Barnes’ forehead throb while  _ he _ dealt with it.

Lewis presses a cold beer in his hands as she passes by his perch on some boxes stacked near the door. She takes a long drag from her own, stood beside him to watch Peter try to squeeze between Scott, waving his arms wildly and speaking so fast it was incoherent, and Barnes, his face flushed an ugly puce and very clearly not in the mood to listen.

“I’m leaving for Norway tomorrow.”

It’s quiet for a long, awkward beat before Sam realizes she’s waiting for a response. He clears his throat. It feels like gravel in his windpipe. “Mazel.”

Lewis sighs. “I know you and Jane didn’t get along —”

“Untrue,” he interjects, taking a big swig from his bottle.

“— but this isn’t about Jane.” Darcy picks some of the label off of her drink, rolling the paper into little balls between her thumb and forefinger before flicking them idly at Scott’s back. “Funerals are about the living, or whatever. Think of who will be there.”

Sam levels her with a glare from the corner of his eye. “Subtle.”

“Not in my job description.” She takes a drink. “Or my DNA,” she adds, a wry twist to her mouth. A wary olive branch, if Sam would take it.

“I’m busy. Thanks for the beer. You and Wanda enjoy yourselves. Say hi to Selvig if you see him.”

Darcy’s eyes narrow dangerously when Sam mentions Wanda, lips pursed so tightly they go a little white. Sam feels a little guilty for the cheapshot, but it gets her to turn heel and leave him alone, so the moment is fleeting. 

When Barnes is done berating Scott, now leaning heavily on Peter’s skinny shoulder and looking utterly beleaguered, he stalks over to Sam. His bleak mood is almost visible as a dark cloud around his shoulders.

Sam has maybe overestimated Barnes’ apathy about moving. After returning, Sam felt no little like Barnes only continued his work out of a kind of rote habit that dying couldn’t break, topped with the need to escape Steve’s permanently dour mood for a few hours out of the day. At his lowest, Sam maybe felt guilty that Barnes was only in it to keep Sam from being alone. Maybe he was wrong, though. Maybe the move is setting them both on edge the same way; the manifestation of the endless loop returning had sent them in:  _ after everything, do you still fit? Can you make room for yourself after the world took your place from you? Is it worth it? Does it even matter? Does it matter? Do you matter? _

“Got another?” Barnes grunts, jerking his chin at Sam’s beer. 

“Just take it,” Sam offers gruffly, holding it out. Barnes downs it in one big, long gulp.

“You should teach scuba if you can hold your breath like that.”

“Instead of this? You think it would be better?” Barnes’ voice is sharp, but Sam doesn’t let himself get rubbed wrong by it. He doesn’t answer at all, because Barnes isn’t really looking for one, and after a moment Barnes speaks again. “The little shit isn’t going to come.”

Sam is glad Barnes took his drink, because he’s sure he would have dropped it from his suddenly numb fingers otherwise. 

“Buck— shit, man. I’m sorry. He hasn’t changed his mind?”

Barnes scrubs at his face roughly. “Have you known him to be in the habit of changing his pigheaded fuckin’ mind once he’s got it made up?”

Sam pinches the space between his brows, leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees. The answer is ‘no,’ of course, but if he’s honest Sam never thought that Steve would actually stay behind while everyone else ventured down to the lot Pepper was loaning them in the Upstate. Steve was hurt, Steve was riddled with guilt and relief and resentment, but weren’t they all? Would staying in the apartment Stark first set him up in really help?

Sam bites the inside of his cheek. And would being away from Barnes help? After all they’ve done to keep him around? He studies Barnes’ profile, his nose a little red, nostrils flared. It’s hard to remember that there are parts of Steve and Barnes both that Sam doesn’t know, and probably won’t ever get to see. Barnes doesn’t look like himself now, or like the Soldier, and barely even like Bucky. From the sounds of it, Steve is not himself, much, either.

His throat is tight when he speaks. This shit used to be his job; he’s not sure why he’s so inept at it now. “Are you — look. If you don’t want to leave, man. I. We’d still be good, if you didn’t want it. If you want to stay.”

Barnes goes very still. Fresh from cryo the first time, Sam and Steve would sometimes catch him like this, unmoving, breathing shallow and silent with long minutes between each inhale. As his body adjusted to being ‘out,’ the episodes grew further apart; when his brain caught up and the memories returned, they picked back up again. If there was ever a good time to choose to kill them, Sam personally felt like Thanos had picked a bad one, right as Barnes was starting to even out.

Very carefully not touching him, Sam leans forward a little. Barnes is staring, unfocused, into middle distance. “Barnes? Hey, Buck—”

Before Sam can stop him, Barnes turns heel and leaves. In the sudden quiet of the room and the echoing  _ ‘???’  _ between his ears, Sam turns sharply to his right. Peter and Scott gape at him, both of their mouths a little open. Scott has his arm slung over Peter’s shoulders, who is blanched white as a sheet and looking terribly, uncomfortably, mortifyingly young.

“He’s not coming, either?”

Sam scrabs a hand over his face. “Does it matter? Parker, we talked about this. You — no matter who decides to come, you’re staying here.”

In one of his uncanny displays of genuine emotional literacy, Scott interrupts Peter’s indignant sputtering and leads him into the next room, leaving Sam alone with hardly more than a parting frown over his shoulder.

* * *

The next morning, Barnes is waiting with Scott and Wanda in the little foyer that leads up to the landing pad on the roof. From around the corner, Lewis stumbles in, very obviously hungover and nursing a steaming espresso like a lifeline. She doesn’t speak to Sam, but wiggles her fingers in barely passable acknowledgement at the other three before posting up to Wanda’s immediate left. 

“Well. Sure hope you find it in your hearts to send me a postcard,” Scott says, thinly cheerful, his hands stuffed in his jeans pockets.

Sam stops short. “You change your mind, Lang?” He tries to keep his voice neutral. He’s not sure it matters.

Scott shrugs, rubbing the back of his neck. “Gonna stay here for a while. Pete still wants to look some more for his aunt and anyway, I don’t know how he’s gonna do with everyone suddenly being...gone, again, I guess. Since he can’t go.”

“He needs to stay to finish school.” The words are out before Sam can stop them, though they’d all sworn not to have this fight again.

“I agree,” Scott acquiesces mildly. “He’s gonna need to be fed and watered in the meantime, though. More than pizza rolls or whatever the youth eat now. Besides, he and Cass are peas in a pod. I can’t split ‘em up just to go kick a little ass. That’s heartless.” 

Sam and Scott shake hands, Barnes and Scott carefully do not look at each other, and Wanda and Lewis both tolerate theatrical, smacking kisses to their cheeks and temples before Scott gives them all a little stilted wave and turns to walk, wooden, down the stairs. 

Wordlessly, they begin to pack the remaining odds and ends onto the jet. On their last load, Bruce appears in the doorway, a tablet close to his face that lights all the grooves and planes up in genuinely unflattering blue light. He knocks needlessly on the doorframe.

“We have a guest,” he offers, distracted still with whatever is on the tablet. Sam hardly hears him. A broad man peers over Bruce’s shoulder, his expression blankly unimpressed. Something prickles the hair on Sam’s arms. He looks vaguely familiar, but that’s not important, really. What’s important is the tickle at the back of Sam’s throat that tastes like old pennies and  _ magic _ , which he hasn’t felt in five years, eight months, and five days.

“Wong,” the stranger introduces himself, with a little dip of his head. “I hear you’re going to Oslo?”

Sam frowns, shaking himself out of his reverie. That’s a strange thing to say, Sam can’t help but think, considering as how there is no Oslo in Upstate New York, where they are definitely going, and how Sam has expressed repeatedly a certain standing level of distaste for Oslo, Norwegians, and Scandinavia at large. 

“We are going to Albany,” Sam says carefully. A furrow appears in Wong’s brow. As if in slow motion, Sam watches his gaze cut from himself, to Barnes, to Banner, to  _ Lewis _ .

“We’re dropping some of you off in Albany,” Lewis grunts, clutching her head and curled on the steps leading up to the rooftop. “Then some of us are going to Oslo. We’ve discussed this.”

Sam grinds his teeth. Wong watches him, his close scrutiny a heavy, thoughtful weight.

“I have a gift to deliver. I hate to ask you to do it on my behalf, but I don’t have the luxury of leaving the city right now.”

“You were with Strange.” Barnes studies Wong carefully as he pulls a kerchief out from the pocket of his black jeans and holds it out towards Sam to take. He doesn’t. “You did the lightshow. Is something wrong with him?”

Wong cocks his eyebrow, somewhere between impressed and annoyed. “The physical rebuilding in this city alone isn’t close to halfway done. Imagine what we have to do to mend the rips in the astral plane to every connected dimension.”

It is very quiet. Sam reasons that the assembled crew, while largely accepting of the metaphysical, would have as hard a time swallowing that one as any other plebeian on the street. 

Wong’s brow barely furrows before he schools it again; if Sam had blinked at the wrong moment he would have never known Wong was irritated to begin with. “And I’m not Strange’s replacement, like you or your partner aren’t place holders for Captain Rogers.”

Barnes makes a funny noise in his windpipe, not unlike the little  _ whuff _ of air that leaves someone when a fist is tight around their throat. There’s a prickle at the back of Sam’s own neck that usually means something sharp or fast is trained on it.

“What’s this?” Sam jerks his chin to the object still wrapped in Wong’s hand, wary to touch it but eager to duck the weight at his back.

“The Hand of Vishanti.”

“Gotta be  _ fucking _ kidding me,” Barnes rumbles, low under his breath and clearly meant just for Sam. 

The corner of his mouth twitches, the pressure in the room a little more bearable.

“It allows the user to find another on the astral plane in a matter of minutes. Seconds, if they’re good enough. Like a compass, I suppose, or a magnet,” Wong pauses, mouth pursed as he scratches absently at the dark hair bristling his wide cheek. “Thor’s abilities are similar to ours but not the same. AM, maybe, instead of FM. This is the best way for us to get in touch if we need to, especially since the physical Sanctum here in New York will be...out of commission for some time longer. No offense, but if something in our wheelhouse goes wrong, none of you would be much help. He’s our best backup.”

“Sounds like we’re going to Oslo,” Bruce says mildly. Sam had nearly forgotten he was there altogether, and his eyes narrow suspiciously as a niggling suspicion tugs the back of his mind. When had Bruce even gotten the memo they were flying out today? Certainly Sam hadn’t passed the message along — he’d assumed Banner would stay, given that he’d all but barricaded himself in his old apartment suite since stumbling a very green return to the city three weeks prior.

From his right, Wanda steps forward, thinner and greyer and more wilted than Sam had ever seen her. She reaches out and tugs Barnes’ sleeve. “They probably have  _ smalehovud _ . I haven’t eaten any since I was little. It might be fun.”

Sam’s stomach twists in guilt, sour and sharp. Was she trying to make them feel better, as bad off as she was? He looks up to meet Bruce’s careful, heavy gaze, the tart twist on Lewis’ mouth, and Barnes’ open, waiting expression. 

He’d chosen to be Captain America. This is, perhaps, a time where he is expected to act like it. In officer training before he’d gotten out, what had they told him?  _ If they’ve decided to follow the calls you make, you owe it to them to make the choices. Decide.  _

Sam reaches out for the kerchief. Wong nods, as if something is settled. It does the opposite to Sam’s gut. 

Foster’s funeral is two days from now. The materials on the jet they couldn’t trust a truck to carry to Albany could wait a week until they needed to be backed up to FRIDAY and set up in the new space. If Sam took the week, he could trust the others still here to manage. Scott was a dumbass, but Carol was intermittently around for Rhodey’s physical therapy appointments. If it was bad enough, she would step in. Surely, if Carol couldn’t handle it, there was nothing Sam could do.

“I’ll get it to him.”

* * *

Lewis appeared on the steps of Stark Tower one month, three weeks, and six days after Sam returned from the dead. Her lank hair was plastered to her face by the rain, though she didn’t seem to notice or care as Wanda scrubbed her dry with a towel in the apartment level’s foyer.

“Jane’s dead,” she greeted them. 

Sam, bent close to Barnes as they cleaned and re-assembled pistols at the coffee table, stilled, refusing to look up from the polish rag in his hand.

“You don’t know that,” Barnes rumbled, after a pause where he clearly expected Sam to speak. “We didn’t find that friend of Peter’s until last week. They didn’t all come back where they left —”

“She came back. I spoke to her mother. She came back, then — then she died. She’s gone.”

Wanda guided Lewis to the couch, the towel carefully tucked around her shoulders.

“I’ll make tea,” she murmured, and after a meaningful look to Barnes, he’d followed her out into the kitchenette.

“I know there’s no lab anymore, but. But I don’t have anywhere else to go, right now.” 

“There’s not much of anything from before anymore.” It came out harsher than Sam intended, and he winced when Lewis flinched under it.

“It’s not fair, to come back just to — what? Get mugged in the street the day after?” Her nose is red, her voice tight. “They left her for weeks and no one found her in the — with all this  _ bullshit _ . Her mom had trouble even doing the ID.” 

It wasn’t his place to teach anyone about things that are fair and things that aren’t, so Sam kept his mouth shut.

“Have you spoken to Thor?”

Sam’s eyes slid closed, and he breathed in slow through his nose. “He left for Oslo right after it was done to get things settled with Valkyrie. If you want the emergency line, FRIDAY can get you in touch.”

“There’s no way he doesn’t know already,” Lewis murmured, clutching the towel tight around her shoulders and staring out of the window into the unnervingly dark skyline around them. “Why hasn’t he answered me yet?”

Sam turned to face the skyline with her, shoulder to shoulder. He thought of his empty voicemail and his call history until Wanda brought their mugs over.

* * *

Barnes jostles Sam’s shoulder as he clambers up to the cockpit, his phone clenched in his left hand and a grimace heavy on his mouth that spells out a poor conversation with Steve has just taken place. Sam hadn’t been dozing so much as he’d been making a conscious effort to keep his thoughts as empty and even as the blue dark around the quinjet. It doesn’t make him feel restful.

“Have you called yet?”

Sam clears his throat, looking down at his hands, which look like how his mother’s used to, which makes him feel his age more than dying did.

“No.”

The phone case in Barnes’ grip gives a protesting, warning squeak. “So we are all supposed to just show up unannounced like nothing matters? I think Valkyrie will have a problem with that.”

“Probably,” Sam nods. More than probably. From the brief, curt introduction he’d made in the rubble of New York, he would wager that the new King of Asgard would most definitely not take kindly to a jet appearing in the middle of the night in their new home, barely rooted yet still.

If Sam is quiet, he can hear Barnes breathing. That’s how he knows Barnes is very, very upset.

“You need,” Barnes grinds out through his bared teeth, “to get your  _ shit _ together.”

Numbly, Sam watches Barnes bring his own phone up to his ear. 

“It’s Barnes,” he says gruffly. From the other end of the line, Sam barely makes out the low suggestion of a deep voice. Whatever is said makes Barnes’ eyes narrow to slits. “ _ Yes _ . We’re going to be landing in the next hour.”

He hangs up, shoves the phone in his hoodie pocket, and glowers at Sam, who can’t even blame him.

“Can you do this?”

“Hm?” Sam grunts, just to buy time and knowing exactly what Barnes is asking. 

Barnes swings his foot out, catching Sam’s shin sharp and fast. “Ain’t fucking Steve. Can you act right when we land or should we leave you fucking behind?”

Sam feels a muscle in his jaw flutter. “I’m also not  _ fucking _ Steve. Back off.”

The air crackles between them as Wanda knocks, timid, at the doorframe. All the confidence she’d worked hard to build after Pietro’s death seemingly did not return with her when she rose; she walked around more like a ghost than even Barnes had ever been. If Sam thinks about it, he hasn’t seen her use her power since wiping dust from her boots and accepting Shuri’s hand up from the battlefield. Even glued to Lewis as is her current wont, Sam is hard pressed to remember the last time she smiled wide enough to show her teeth, much less laughed and really meant it.

“Do you need to switch? You haven’t slept since before we left.”

Sam feels Barnes glaring two holes into his left cheek. It’s most definitely his form of encouragement for Sam to pull it together. 

“Nah, but thanks.” He tries to smile, but his jaw feels rusty, and Wanda most definitely doesn’t buy it. “We’ve got less than an hour now. Maybe get Banner and Lewis up and moving?”

She nods, but hesitates in the doorway before leaving. Sam watches her warily as she comes to some decision and steps forward to put her hand on his shoulder, brief and light. She walks out without another word, and it’s wordless still as Barnes sits by his side and guides the jet down some time later.

* * *

For whatever reason, Sam expected Thor to gracefully bow out of their welcoming committee upon landing in Norway. It’s what Sam would have at least considered doing, in Thor’s shoes, and seeing as how Thor has avoided every possible opportunity to see or speak to Sam before now, Sam half prepared himself to go the whole week without running into him at all. Seeing him stood beside Valkyrie with his arms crossed over his chest and his expression placid as Sam descends from the jet nearly makes him do a double take. 

Valkyrie watches them clamber out, eyes clear and grey as the stirrings of dawn around them. She doesn’t offer to help, and she doesn’t speak until Sam manages to drag his feet close enough to her to stick a hand out. 

She meets it immediately, gripping his forearm like he’s seen Banner and Thor do. 

“Sorry about the short notice,” he nods politely. 

“No need.” Her dark braids are woven through with tiny golden hoops and the occasional studded gem which glint in the growing light as she inclines her head in return. He’s lost her attention, though, her gaze trained on Banner, who ambles forward grinning more like a schoolboy than anyone named “Bruce Banner” should be capable of at all. Sam lets her go meet him, forcing himself to look to her right.

He watches Thor hesitate, visibly weighing his options before stepping forward. When his massive hand comes to rest on Sam’s shoulder, unbearably light, the little scar on Sam’s ribcage gives an aching throb. Where Thor stabbed him to save their mission — to save Sam’s life. Left side, right under his heart, a weight he’s suddenly conscious of in the cage of his chest.

“Hello, Sam.”

His hair isn’t shorn short any longer. It’s got a little barely-curl to it, grown out as it is to brush his shoulders, and his face is lined and drawn like it wasn’t before. Crows feet branch out from under the plain patch covering his right eye, and a little grey peppers his stubble. He hadn’t stuck around long enough after the fight for Sam to get a good look at him, but it’s hard to think he somehow missed this, even from afar.

“Hey, man,” he offers weakly. There’s stuffing dry in his throat that’s hard to speak past. His hand comes up to press flat to Thor’s waist, fast and light. When he steps out from under Thor’s hand, he clears his throat and speaks again. “I’m sorry about Foster.”

He watches Thor’s expression shift to something old and mournful enough that the sight of it sets Sam back another step, heavy enough that he feels it settle on his shoulders — as much of an ache as his own grief, his own guilt has been. Slowly, Thor nods, an answering rumble in his chest that stretches root-deep and horizon-wide. The hairs on Sam’s arm prickle.  _ Not human, not human, not human.  _

Not human, if that has ever mattered.

Lewis, arm-in-arm with Selvig, marches over with a painfully obvious effort to make a lot of noise in the process and break them up. Sam nods at Thor once more before turning heel and leaving them together, refusing to look back. Barnes and Wanda make an easy space between them for Sam to join in being led to their lodgings for the week. 

Five years, eight months, and six and a half days of living, again. Sam’s grateful — he’d never say otherwise. But after five years, eight months, and six and a half days, Sam’s unsure who’s life he’s been carrying on with.

**Author's Note:**

> Do I have any business posting this? No. 
> 
> This was originally intended for the SWBB last year, but life got in the way. 
> 
> I am 62k+ words in my novel with at least about 50k to go, the Marvel RBB coming up, all of the other WIPs you see on my dashboard, and my day job...and yet. This has just been tugging at me. Sorry if the updates are slow!
> 
> Thank you for reading! Feedback is always appreciated :)


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